Chris Christie suggests Trump's family members should leave their White House jobs
President Trump's daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, should resign from their jobs at the White House, Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) suggested Sunday in an interview on ABC's This Week.
Trump will ultimately "have to make [the] judgment" about whether his family members are still an asset to the administration, Christie said. "And there were many of us who counseled the president" not to hire family, he continued, "not because they weren't competent or qualified or that the president didn't trust them, but because when circumstances come up that the president couldn't have been aware of — and in a normal situation, you might terminate a staff member for that reason — it becomes a lot more difficult if you're going to be sitting at Thanksgiving dinner with that person."
Christie brought up the recent resignation announcement from Hope Hicks, the White House communications director who was long a Trump aide and confidante. He praised Hicks as a model for other administration staff, Kushner and Ivanka Trump included, because she left her post when she became "a distraction for the president and less of an asset."
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Read The Week's Ryan Cooper on the corruption case against Kushner, and watch an excerpt of Christie's comments below. Bonnie Kristian
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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